MDMA
Article
MDMA is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 19, 2021 and January 16, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “drug-assisted therapies (eg with LSD or MDMA)”; “First jhana is basically MDMA. You can find several people who advocate MDMA as absolutely life-changing”; “When people say that taking MDMA/”Ecstasy” feels super amazing”. It most often appears alongside LSD, Bay Area, Bostrom.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: July 19, 2021
- Last seen: January 16, 2026
Appears In
- Peer Review Request: Ketamine
- Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas
- Profile: The Far Out Initiative
- Book Review: Deep Utopia
- The Dilbert Afterlife
Related Pages
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- LSD (3 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (2 shared issues)
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- Bostrom (2 shared issues)
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- Buddhism (2 shared issues)
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- David Pearce (2 shared issues)
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- Einstein (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Internet (2 shared issues)
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- Nick Bostrom (2 shared issues)
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- Oxford (2 shared issues)
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- Scott Alexander (2 shared issues)
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- Shakespeare (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is a little different, and works more like other drug-assisted therapies (eg with LSD or MDMA). The idea is that ketamine gets you into an unusually fluid mental state where you’re able to reach insights and produce changes that would otherwise be unavailable (for a description of why this might happen, read Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain or this review of it). Ketamine isn’t a traditional psychedelic, but it seems to produce some of the same effects.
There are no good studies showing this works. Here is an open-label, no-placebo study showing it works, but everything works in open-label non-placebo studies. That having been said, many patients say it works, and there’s strong preliminary evidence for other psychedelic therapies like MDMA.
Inline links: Here
Also, a common opinion among KAP providers is that ketamine is less good for this than LSD or MDMA, and is only their drug of choice because it’s legal. If you’re going to do this illegally, you might want to consider using an actually illegal substance, which could be more effective.
When people say that taking MDMA/”Ecstasy” feels super amazing, this is also self-reported introspection, but I still trust these people. Most people who take MDMA say it, it doesn’t seem implausible that there’s some stuff that can give you really high amounts of bliss, and again, self-reports seem like perfectly fine evidence.
First jhana is basically MDMA. You can find several people who advocate MDMA as absolutely life-changing, everyone should be on MDMA, etc.
If you believe that about MDMA, believe it about first jhana I guess. I will say the first time I did first jhana (with poor technique but hey), I did have the feeling "oh my god this is what I've needed, so much!" Better than really good, mindblowing sex? Well, different anyway, if the love and acceptance feeling is what you lacked before.
The counterarguments write themselves. Brave New World, drain all meaning from life, live in pods, eat bugs, that kind of thing. Pearce has counter-counter-arguments to all of them (you can see his answers to a few hundred common questions here). He thinks that if the normal human emotional range is 100 points centered on 0 (let’s say from tortured despair at -50 to ecstasy at +50) then it would be just as meaningful to live in the 100 point range centered at +100 (from ecstasy at +50 to ultra-ecstasy at +150).
Inline links: here
Pearce’s old friend Nick Bostrom imagines a future of superintelligence. But Pearce will count his own contribution complete if he gives us superhappiness, supermeaning, superbeauty, and superspirituality. And why shouldn’t he? People on LSD and MDMA have all of these things. All we need to do is figure out how to do it without the trippy hallucinations, urge to go to raves, and occasional neurotoxicity. Don’t say it’s impossible! All you need to do is find the right Scottish person!
Inline links: and occasional neurotoxicity
We can start by bounding the damage. Our deep utopia will know how to wirehead people safely. So worst-case scenario, if you absolutely can’t figure out anything else to do, you live in perfect bliss forever. Bostrom urges us not to reflexively turn up our noses at this outcome. Wireheading grosses us out because our best approximations for it - drugs, porn, etc - are tawdry and shallow. Actually-good wireheading would be neither. You could walk through the woods at sunrise, experiencing a combination of the joy you felt at the birth of your first child, the excitement Einstein experienced upon seeing the first glimmers of relativity, and the ecstasy of St. Teresa as she gazed upon the face of God. That afternoon, you could walk somewhere else, and feel an entirely different artisanal combination of blisses. “It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow.”
Inline links: would be neither
If wireheading seems too meaningless, you can add in wireheaded-meaning. People often say that an MDMA trip or mystical vision was the most meaningful experience of their lives. It would be trivial for our Deep Utopians to hack your brain to see a world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower. We're gonna mean so much, you might even get tired of meaning. And you'll say 'please, please, it's too much meaning. We can't take it anymore, Professor Bostrom, it's too much!'
Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants - but I don’t know if they ever met. I wonder what it would have been like if they did. I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny. Scott Adams couldn’t stop frittering his talent and fortune on doomed attempts to be taken seriously. But someday Elon Musk will buy America for $100 trillion, tell the UN that he’s renaming it “the United States of 420-69”, and the assembled ambassadors will be as silent as the grave. Are there psychic gains from trade to be had between two such people?